The Sunday Gentleman

by Irving Wallace

  In March, 1879, through his father’s contacts, Bertillon went to work as a lowly auxiliary clerk in the French Sûreté headquarters in Paris. His duties, inside his tiny, cold cubicle, were dull, monotonous and, he felt, quite stupid. Several times, he was tempted to quit, but something about the work returned him to his desk. His job consisted of recording descriptions of criminals arrested during the day, just in case the same criminals should ever turn up again. But the descriptions consisted of generalities that were impossible to file accurately, and so they were never used. The pointlessness of the method was what bored Bertillon, and yet challenged him. To make his job more interesting, he decided to improve on the primitive system of catching repeaters.

  Just a half century before, he learned, the only means of checking on whether an offender was an ex-convict was by seeing if he had been branded with a red-hot iron. When branding was abolished by law, the police in France, as well as those in other nations, were limited to age-worn tricks. They would plant a detective, dressed as a prisoner, in the new convict’s cell. They would offer bonuses to detectives who located repeaters, and they would write lengthy descriptions, too vague to be classified. It was a farce. A man had only to change his name or features, however crudely, to avoid being recognized as a previous offender. Habitual criminals were constantly turned loose for lack of concrete identification. The police were helpless. Crime had a holiday.

  And then Alphonse Bertillon remembered his human skulls: that no two were alike. An idea struck him. Age, hunger, sickness might alter a murderer’s flesh but not his bones. His study of statistics had told him that between the ages of twenty and sixty, certain parts of the human body do not change. The width of a man’s head, his right ear, his left middle finger—all three normally remain the same size. Bertillon checked and rechecked. The ear alone, he calculated, was enough to identify thousands of criminals. There were twenty distinctive parts to a single ear. A killer might dye his hair, bob his nose, lift his chin. But unless he cut it off, the ear remained the same, difficult to disguise, easy to observe.

  Thus, within eight months of the day he had joined the Sûreté as a lowly clerk, twenty-six-year-old Alphonse Bertillon had conceived his revolutionary system of classifying and trapping criminals by measuring certain unchangeable parts of the human body. He called his invention “anthropometry” or body measurement, and it consisted of making a composite chart of a criminal’s eleven unalterable features.

  Enthusiastically, he presented his system to Police Prefect Andrieux. He waited for congratulations. Andrieux scanned the outline of the system, and then threw it back at Bertillon. “You are a lunatic,” said Andrieux. “Get out.”

  Bertillon was confused. Back in his office, he. reread his presentation of his system, took it apart, put it together again, made subtractions, additions, finally rewrote it in more detail. Once more, he submitted it to the police prefect. This time Andrieux completely lost his temper. “So now clerks tell us how to run the Sûreté! I will teach you a lesson!” Andrieux dashed off a note to Bertillon’s father stating that the young man was mentally unstable, and that he would be fired if he persisted in expounding his cracked theory.

  Exasperated, the elder Bertillon summoned his son for a final showdown. Alphonse appeared, not with contrition but with the summary of his system in hand. In an hour, anthropometry had its first convert. Excitedly, the elder Bertillon appealed to the prefect, but to no avail. The Sûreté chief refused to reconsider. It had become a matter of saving face.

  Alphonse Bertillon returned to his clerical desk. He dared not mention his system. A single word, and he would be fired. He wanted to remain in the Sûreté desperately now. So he played dumb, and waited. He waited one year, two years, three years. The future seemed hopeless. And then, suddenly, Andrieux was out, and a new police prefect named Camescasse was in.

  Once again, Bertillon presented his revolutionary system. The new prefect listened with a tolerant smile, admitted that he realized the importance of what Bertillon was trying to do, admitted also that he had not the slightest comprehension of how Bertillon planned to do it. But he was impressed by the young clerk’s enthusiasm. “Monsieur Bertillon, you shall have your chance. I will give you exactly three months. If in three months your identity system has caught one recidivist, the Sûreté will permanently adopt it. If in three months it has caught none, you are to drop it forever and never bother us again. That is the gamble I offer. Are you satisfied?”

  Three months did not seem enough. Bertillon hesitated. But it was this or nothing. “I accept, sir. You shall have at least one criminal because of my system in three months. And, thank you, sir!”

  On the morning of December 13, 1882, Bertillon introduced the world’s first scientific system of classifying criminals. Bertillon began by forcing each offender into a revolving chair, which is still used at the Sûreté today, and taking a series of 24-by-30-inch glass-plate photographs. Until that date, the Sûreté had photographed about 60,000 criminals, stiff, full-faced, unrevealing portraits. Bertillon changed all that He introduced, despite the difficulties presented by time exposure, a pioneer form of candid photography. Convicts were photographed informally, in natural poses. Bertillon played down the standard full-faced picture, which he felt distorted the appearance, especially of the nose. Instead, he concentrated on profiles, which he felt gave police a more honest view of a man’s brow, nose, chin. Also, he snapped close-ups of prominent facial features.

  Next, Bertillon applied his system of recording physiological statistics. Each man’s head, right ear, left middle finger, left forearm, and left foot were carefully measured and noted. The measurements were taken three times and averaged, except in the case of the head, where all three measurements had to agree exactly. There were other measurements: left index finger, arm spread, chest girth, height. Physical oddities, like moles and scars, were jotted down. Even the exact shade of the eyes was recorded; Bertillon felt the color of adult eyes never changed. All of this was placed on an index card, and, with the photographs, classified and filed according to a clever system of size groupings Bertillon had created. The file which Bertillon inaugurated that first day, sixty-seven years ago, may still be seen in the Sûreté Identity Department, above the Summary Courts of the Palais de Justice in Paris—except that, today, these files contain ten million cards, with names now classified phonetically instead of alphabetically, each record being kept on file for ninety years.

  As the first day gave way to the first week, and then to the first month, Bertillon recognized the unavoidable flaws in his system. Juvenile delinquents or aged criminals, whose bone structures were changing, growing, deteriorating, were not represented in his file. Then there was the human element involved in measuring. Some Sûreté operators measured a convict in a slipshod fashion, some so carefully as to exaggerate reality. Nevertheless, Bertillon felt that his identification method was accurate enough to catch most repeaters. Yet, at the end of two months, he had failed to identify a single one.

  It was on a dreary afternoon, in late February of 1883, that a stocky young man, about thirty years old, stood before Bertillon. He said his name was Dupont. Bertillon snorted. This was the day’s sixth Dupont, a name which in France is often used as a fictitious name, as Americans use John Doe. The man had been arrested while committing an act of burglary. As a first offense, this was not so serious. As a second offense, they could throw the book at him. Dupont insisted that this was his first crime. Bertillon took his measurements, and then began checking his new files. He came up with two cards. The statistics on one did not completely correspond with Dupont’s. The other card bore the measurements of a man named Martin, who had been arrested for burglary eight weeks before. Martin’s measurements, from ear to fingers, and forearm, were exactly the same as Dupont’s!

  Trembling, Bertillon confronted Dupont. “Do you recognize those photographs. Monsieur Martin? They were taken on your last visit here.”

  Dupont stared. “He l
ooks like me, but his nose is longer.”

  “Exactly. You altered your nose. But you could not alter, your bone structure. Read the measurements for yourself!”

  Faced with the facts, Dupont surrendered, admitted that he was Martin, and confessed to a half-dozen previous offenses.

  Bertillon had won his long-shot gamble. In less than three months, his new system had succeeded The sensation it created was tremendous. The prefect promoted him. The Sûreté honored him. The press pestered him. There was an avalanche of requests for interviews, speeches, and banquet appearances. But Bertillon was busy. In the first year, 7,336 criminals were measured, and 49 repeaters caught and jailed. In the second year, 241 repeaters were caught. Before ten years were up, Bertillon’s identification system would place 3,500 dangerous criminals behind bars in France alone. In 1885, the Sûreté officially adopted anthropometry, and three years later, Bertillon was promoted to chief of the new Identity Department with a sizable raise in salary.

  The individual cases solved by Bertillon’s system were spectacular. A body, swollen and distorted by immersion in water, was fished out of the Marne River. The shirt was monogrammed P.C., the key ring initialed J.D. Bertillon took measurements, consulted his files, identified the body by its large skull, found the victim’s previous history, and through it the clues that led to the murderer. Another time, a bricklayer named Rollin disappeared. His wife and friends identified him as one of three corpses in the morgue. Bertillon wasn’t sure. An hour before the funeral, he measured the corpse, found it to be the body of a famous criminal and not that of Rollin. Later, Bertillon proved that Rollin was still alive.

  Then there was the case of a tall, blond German known as Hiller who had committed a cold-blooded murder outside of Lyons. Witnesses thought that they had seen a tall, blond man hurriedly catch a train to Paris, only the man had appeared to be French, not German. Fortunately, there was a Bertillon index card on Hiller, which included the notation, “Roman nose with turned-down base, triangular ears; he habitually gnaws at his nails.” Sûreté detectives watched the exits of the Gare de Lyon. A tall, blond, Roman-nosed foreigner came striding through. The detectives started, but halted. This man’s nose base was straight, his ears round. The detectives made a quick decision. A commotion about the wrong man might scare off the real fugitive. The detectives waited. And then, seconds later, came another tall, blond man. The Sûreté ignored his French clothes, concentrating only on his face. Roman nose with turned-down base. Triangular ears. The detectives swarmed over him. When they pulled off his gloves, they saw that his nails were bitten. At headquarters, his measurements coincided with Killer’s. He was Hiller. And he confessed to the killing.

  But skeptics wondered if Bertillon’s system could penetrate a really professional disguise. To prove that it could, Bertillon dramatically caught an absconding bank teller, who had managed to change himself from a plump, bushy-haired, popeyed businessman to a skinny, bald, rheumy-eyed tramp, caught him by the unchanged appearance of his ears.

  These cases gave Bertillon prestige inside France, but his methods were still little understood by the world at large. This was remedied by the antics of Michel Eyraud and his pretty, twenty-one-year-old mistress, Gabrielle Bompard. One evening in July of 1889, Gabrielle Bompard lured a well-off government official named Gouffé to her Paris apartment with promises of love; then, as she disrobed, she teasingly slipped the cord of her dressing gown around his neck. That moment, she signaled Eyraud to step from behind a curtain and yank the cord tight. The murdered official was robbed, stuffed into a trunk, and the trunk dumped off a road near Lyons.

  In search of a prosperous new life, Eyraud and Bompard sailed for Canada, spent time in Montreal, and then in San Francisco, and finally went into the wine business in the small community of Saint Helena, California. Meanwhile, a month after the crime, the French Sûreté had located Gouffe’s corpse and the trunk. By November, 1889, based on clues unearthed by a brilliant inspector named Goron, and through use of Bertillon’s system of identification, the Sûreté decided that the murderer had been Eyraud, and his accomplice had been Gabrielle Bompard. Two Sûreté detectives, Huillier and Soudais, were sent on a fantastic chase across Canada, the United States, Mexico, hunting for the fugitive pair. However, on her own, Gabrielle Bompard, and a new male companion she had acquired, returned to Paris, where she surrendered herself to the Sûreté. And shortly after, Eyraud was trapped in Havana, and brought back to Paris. The pair were turned over to Bertillon, who photographed them, measured them three times, and filed their statistics away with others in his growing list of criminals. After a sensational trial, in which Gabrielle’s susceptibility to hypnotism became the cornerstone of her defense and received headlines throughout the world, the two were found guilty of premeditated murder. Eyraud was sentenced to death, and executed on the guillotine in 1891. Gabrielle was sentenced to a jail term, and not released until 1905. The international publicity that Bertillon gained from his minor role in this case, as well as added publicity that he obtained from measuring the battered face of an anarchist named Ravachol, who had blown up the home of the Paris public prosecutor, helped familiarize other nations with the new identity system.

  Bertillon’s fame spread. Among the first of the foreign cities to adopt his system was Chicago, after Major R. W. McClaughry, warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, translated Bertillon’s methods into English and became his foremost disciple. In New York, the crack detective. Inspector Thomas Byrnes, who worked under Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt, adopted Bertillon’s criminal photography and invented an album whose nickname was soon to become a byword in the United States, the “Rogues’ Gallery,” The International Association of Chiefs of Police organized a global clearinghouse of Bertillon records in Washington, D.C. Bertillon himself never found time to visit America. Instead, as his ambassador, he sent his brother, Jacques, who amazed him by reporting back that even a railroad porter in Philadelphia recognized the family name. The only concession Bertillon made to help spread his gospel was his attendance at crime congresses throughout Europe. He was terrified of speechmaking, and when forced to speak in public, wrote out every word in advance. At the International Prison Congress, in Rome, he satisfied detectives of every nation with a thorough ninety-five-page report on his system.

  His name became a part of the language. People spoke of “bertillonage.” In the nightclubs on Montmartre’s hill, in Le Lapin Agile and in Moulin de la Galette, painted ladies sang topical tunes about Bertillon’s “I’identification anthropometrique.” Czar Nicholas II sent him a gold-and-pearl clock, and Queen Victoria sent him a medal, for helping with identity work in Russia and Great Britain. The future King Edward VII, Victoria’s son, came to see the Sûreté laboratory, and requested Bertillon to measure two criminals before him personally. Fourteen foreign governments, including Sweden and Austria, honored or knighted him. His name and his invention were everywhere, and the world was becoming a safer place in which to live.

  With his system apparently established, Bertillon restlessly searched for new crime problems. Intrigued by so-called perfect crimes, he risked his reputation by going into the field to solve them. And in these efforts, he gave law enforcement one of its earliest tastes of modem psychology and deduction.

  A robbery suspect was jailed with only the weakest evidence against him. Bertillon felt sure of the man’s guilt, but he could not prove it. Privately, using his police as actors, he reconstructed the crime as he deduced it had happened. At last, satisfied with his theory, Bertillon prepared to verify it. One night, he slipped into the burglar’s cell. Then, pencil and pad in hand, he sat patiently beside the sleeping man. At dawn, the man woke, yawned, was about to turn over, when he saw Bertillon making notes beside him. He sat up with a shriek. “What are you doing here?” Bertillon waved his notebook. “Taking down your full confession, monsieur. You talked in your sleep. You told me every detail of your crime. Ah, you do not believe me? Very well.
I shall read your confession from my notebook.” Bertillon looked down at the blank pages in his notebook and pretended to read. Step by step, he described the man’s crime as he had earlier reconstructed it. The criminal gave up any further resistance. He signed a formal confession of guilt. Bertillon’s deductions had been correct to the most trivial detail.

  Again, a wealthy, well-known European figure. Baron Zeidler, was found dead in his stables. Nearby, neighing and kicking, was his newest hunter. The baron was examined, and hoof marks were found on his face and skull. He had obviously been knocked unconscious and then kicked to death by the unruly horse. It was a terrible accident. Bertillon, strolling in and about the stables, asked to see the deceased baron’s face. He studied the hoof marks thoughtfully, then announced, “Gentlemen, this was not an accident but murder. Very clever. Well planned. But the murderer slipped. You see, the horseshoe marks on Baron Zeidler’s face are at the wrong angle. He’d have to have been standing on his head when the horse kicked him to receive the marks in this fashion.” Bertillon’s deduction was accurate. After a brief investigation, the murderer was caught. He had summoned the baron to the stables, and then battered him about the head and face with a heavy club to which a pair of horseshoes was tied.

  Bertillon believed that too much police evidence depended upon eyewitnesses (“Most people look without seeing,” he would say), too much depended upon hearsay, guesswork, and not enough upon cold scientific factual evidence. He had turned the Sûreté into a mammoth, machinelike laboratory. His enemies, conservative, old-fashioned, at home and abroad, challenged some of his scientific innovations. Bertillon’s reply was to point to the Tellier case.